


Substitutes

by abigailnicole



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-05 22:36:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20280973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abigailnicole/pseuds/abigailnicole
Summary: It has to get out of her system sometime, Nesta reasons, fucking someone with the right face shape up against a table. There are only so many times she can have disappointing sex with Cassian look-alikes before she can move on, right?—a Frost & Starlight Nessian fic





	Substitutes

The first male she sleeps with has the hazel eyes. 

It’s the winter of Velaris, and Nesta is drunk, as usual, drunk enough that it’s hard to feel the cold in her fingertips. Drunk enough that the next day, she doesn’t remember the name of the male, just remembers catching sight of hazel eyes across the bar, feeling a line of fire in her belly. He’s not tall enough, this male, and his voice is wrong, but he doesn’t make any cutting quips and he doesn’t smell like the fire that will consume her, and he doesn’t understand her, and she’s not ready for those things. So she takes him home, and to shut that wrong mouth she kisses him against the doorway, and covers his mouth with her hand, and stares into his hazel eyes as she guides his hands on her cunt, ending up doing most of the work herself. She stares into his eyes as she lowers herself down onto him, ignoring the mouth, the hair. She doesn’t come and when he does she digs her nails into his back, drawing blood, anger and frustration he mistakes for passion. When he sees the blood on the sheets the next day he trembles in fear. She doesn’t get out of bed as he leaves, doesn’t ask for his name. She lays on the dirty sheets, in the gray light, and breathes in and out very slowly, listening to the hiss of the silence. And then it’s over, it’s done with. The loss of her virginity not traumatizing, not particularly painful, just—disappointing. Anticlimactic, in every way. She breathes in and out on the slightly sour-smelling sheets, her body growing colder. She’s a little sore. She thought it’d be worse, feared so much worse.

She thinks, unwillingly, of Cassian’s lips on the side of her neck, and her whole body burns and she feels like screaming. Disappointing is good, because the opposite of disappointing is meaningful, and nothing means anything so sex shouldn’t, either.

She still feels hungry, a void laced with anger. Facedown on the sheets, her body burns and she works her fingers under her hips, closing her eyes as she shoves fingers inside, using the heel of her hand roughly to work out an orgasm. She can’t stop herself from remembering his hot mouth on the side of her neck as she comes. 

Her hand comes out stickier than usual. She inhales on the sheets. The orgasm feels the same as before. 

It didn’t work.

So the next night Nesta tries again, this time a Fae male with the right color hair. This time she shoves his head between her legs, so she can see that head of hair between her thighs. Even then she uses her own hand plus his inexpert licking to grind out an orgasm, the image of hair the color of Cassian’s between her legs burned into her vision. She doesn’t want to look at his face after she comes so she makes him fuck her from behind. She doesn’t come again.

He tries to put an arm around her, afterwards, and only then does she turn to meet his gaze, her eyes burning with anger as she hisses “ _ Out _ .”

She lays on the sheet facedown for a long time after he leaves. The sour smell is different, now, stronger than the night before. Nesta stares at the window, the darkness with swirling snow. 

There are so many things she doesn’t think about, these days. Watching his wings sliced open, his face a mask of agony. The way he tried to crawl toward her on the floor of that throne room, blood pooling under him. The way his hands felt on the small of her back. She can’t think about his eyes on hers in that battle, when he reached up to hold her and she could feel his blood soaking, warm, through the front of her shirt. Her mind skitters away from their only kiss, stolen on a battlefield with a sword raised over both their bodies, from closing her eyes and laying against him, waiting for the steel to finally get her, too. 

It’s worse that it didn’t. 

Thoughts like those make the void worse. It feels sometimes like it overtakes her, the cold and the anger so strong that she can’t see, she can’t breathe, and she doesn’t understand how she can live with that feeling and how she isn’t dead already.She breathes in the sour sheets and stares at the swirling snow at the edge of the window, until her anger goes enough that she can breathe again. Maybe disappointing sex isn’t helping. She grinds her teeth and touches herself again, brushing herself with ragged nails and pushing hard with her hand until she comes. This time she thinks of nothing.

Nesta may be self destructive but she’s not stupid, so the next day she buys the contraceptive draught, drinking it as soon as she gets home, savoring the bitter taste. She can’t tell if she’s hungry so she just picks up her book again. Later she’ll have to bathe, probably. The thought makes her stomach clench up. It takes her hours to work up the strength to sit in the dry bathtub & pour the buckets of water over herself, between her legs. 

She can’t stop. Later that week it’s a male Cassian’s height, who she takes against a wall. Another night it’s tattoos she sees peeking out from under a collar at the seedy bar she always goes to. When she gets him home the tattoos are all wrong, but by then it’s too late for her to care. She lets no one touch her afterward. They only stay if she’s too drunk to kick them out. 

It has to get out of her system sometime, Nesta reasons, fucking someone with the right face shape up against a table. There are only so many times she can have disappointing sex with Cassian look-alikes before she can move on, right? Maybe if she could find an Illyrian. But weeks pass and she finds none in the city’s seedier bars. She hears gossip from some of the Fae males that the Ilyrians have been ordered to stay away from her.

Territorial bastard. She hisses her revenge against another male’s throat, scaring him off when she draws blood from biting his neck during sex, his yelp and hurried flight from the apartment leaving only drops of blood on the floor. Nesta takes out her frustration in her own bed, again and again and again, hissing “_fucking Ilyrian _ _ bastard _ ” before she comes. 

The winter drags on. It snows every day. Sometimes she’s can’t gather the strength to open her front door and drinks wine alone, leaving empty bottles on the floor that she never bothers to clean up. Sometimes she stands in the kitchen, holding a knife, wondering what it would do to the void inside of her, if anything can make it shut up. At night she dreams of the sound of her father’s neck snapping on that battlefield, dreams of her sister being shoved under the surface of that dark water. In the worst dreams she watches the water close over her own head and wakes herself with screaming. 

She doesn’t dream of Feyre. Feyre never needed her. 

The solstice creeps up on her. 

It’s worse, seeing them. Elain looks fine, better, gaining weight, smiling. It feels like a distorted version of her sister. The most real version of Elain is the one she watches disappear under the dark water again and again and again, and the nightmare makes the woman in front of her look unreal. Feyre looks as unfamiliar as she always has, like the stranger she always was. It feels like the brief moment, three sisters holding each other in front of a fire, happened to someone else. She can barely remember trying to go to the wall to look for Feyre—memories that could belong to a someone else, too. She is someone else now, Nesta supposes. 

Worst of all seeing  him  again. It throws into sharp relief the ways all the males she has been fucking are inadequate. She feels his eyes locked on her and doesn’t meet them.What does she have to do to chase him away? She is aware of every inch of his body, and thinking about it—all the traits she has taken piecemeal from every male she can get her hands on—makes something ignite low in her belly. 

Only Elain gets her a present. Nesta wishes that didn’t hurt as much as it did. She knows she doesn’t belong here. With every passing minute the void in her grows, and grows, and grows. When she can’t take it she slips out without saying goodbye, and only Feyre watches her go. Pays her off like a whore. 

Though she hears the crunch of the snow behind her and realizes he saw her go, too. She turns around and meets his gaze for the first time all evening.

Fuck. She had hoped that not seeing him would make it mean less, would make her forget. His broad shoulders, his large wings curving behind him, throwing shadows that bracket her on each side. The face, the mouth, the eyes. She’s tried not to fantasize about him but he’s the apex of her fantasies and she hates it, she wants to be free, she hates the rush of blood between her legs and the way she can’t stop looking at him. Snow falls silently between them. His eyes can’t leave her face.

“I’ll walk you home,” he says, and something cracks inside of her and now the void is  howling .

“I’m fine,” she says, and her mind is raging and raging and she’s gripping the books like her life depends on it. She can feel  it welling up inside of her, that thing she can’t control, that thing she stole from the Cauldron, tied to the fire and the void that threatens to destroy her.

“It’s a long walk, and it’s late.” 

_ Is that all you have to say to me?  _ She wants to scream, but she’s afraid to speak with the void in her, louder than it’s been in weeks. “Go back into the house,” she says, her voice low and rough. 

Cassian studies her face, looking at her eyes, then smirks at her. “I think I need some fresh air, anyway.” His gaze travels down her body, but she can’t mistake the shadow that appears in his eyes for lust as he takes in the collarbones that are too sharp through her dress, the waistband that hangs looser than it did a month ago.

She was afraid that any more words would trigger her, make that magic inside her explode, but the smirk has done something else instead. She feels the flame in her belly grow warmer and knows she’s getting wet. Fine. Lean into that. _Don’t lose control again, don’t loose the power, don’t hurt anyone else._ She rolls her eyes and starts walking and he falls into step beside her. She can feel the warmth emanating from his body, somehow, and after a block she can’t take it and stops, turning on him. “Go back into the house.” 

He grins at her, and gods that makes it worse. “I will. After I drop you off at your front door.” 

He keeps walking and her gaze goes to a box in his hands. “What,” she says, walking after him, “is that.” 

“Your solstice present,” he says, casually. 

Solstice Present. She clutches the books from Elain. The only one who got her a present. Not even from Feyre. Nothing from any of those damn people who were pretending to like her for Feyre’s sake, nothing even from Amren, the only one she could stand among them. “I don’t want one,” she says, her nails digging into her books. _Not gifts. Not friends. Not family. Not even her own life._

“You’ll want this one,” Cassian says, oblivious. 

_ Not this one, not this one, not this life,  _ her brain screams, and she feels like she is going back underwater, going back under the sword and gods please let her stay there this time, don’t make her live with it—

“I don’t want anything from you,” she says, her voice louder than she meant it to be. 

Cassian cocks an eyebrow at her and his eyes travel down her body. “You sure about that, sweetheart?”

She fights and lets anger and arousal overtake despair. She’s long practiced with those emotions, anyway. “I’ve made my thoughts clear enough on what I want from you,” she says, anger coiling in her voice, but it’s the edge of despair on her thoughts that thinks  _ what if I could? What if—just once _

And Nesta can see how it would go, how she would want it, even out here in the cold, in an alleyway, on the solstice. How she would turn to him, hissing her anger, letting her books fall in the snow as she grabbed his face in both hands, and press her mouth to his and shove that anger against him. He could take it. None of these other males even came close, breaking against her, useless after a few moments, all afraid of her. But Cassian is not afraid of her. He would grab her hair in one hand and pull, hard like she wanted, and pull her against his hard body with his other hand, and she knows she could fight and kick and bite at his neck and shoulders, and clench her thighs against his hand, and come on his hand and on his mouth and his cock, come with her nails digging into his back, and he wouldn’t back down from any of it. She wants his shoulder to yield soft between her teeth, wants his tongue hot against the side of her neck, wants to shove his hands against her wet cunt and clench and clench on him, wants to feel that mouth biting her nipples. He would hold her down while he fucked her, her wrists in an iron grip, and he wouldn’t let her look away, and he would hurt her like she needed to be hurt, could take all the hurt she needed to give—

And then the wind blows cold against her skin, and she realizes they will never have sex on the streets of Velaris on Solstice night, and she cannot cannot bring him to the apartment of despair and sheets stained with the substitutes, the lesser males she’s been wishing were him, and he is staying at that house she cannot go back to, and there is nothing for them, then. She feels as trapped as she ever did at the house where she and her sisters used to starve, together. And more alone. 

“I’m tired of playing these bullshit games,” he says, and anger sharpens his tone. 

Anger, then. That’s easy. She’s alone now. “I’m not,” she says, and continues marching back towards her apartment. He can look down on her, her apartment, her attitude, the whole shitty piece of life she carved out of nothing—but at least she chose it. 

“Well, everyone else is. Perhaps you can find it in yourself to try a little harder this year.” 

Anger flares again and she glares at him. “Try?” Like they tried to help her? Like they bothered to talk to her?

“I know that’s a foreign word to you.”

She stops in the middle of the street, her back to the frozen river, facing him down. “Why should  _I _ have to  _try _ to do anything?” She ’s  baring her teeth, practicaly hissing. “I was dragged into this world of yours, this court.”

“Then go somewhere else.”

The hut, unbidden, flashes into her mind. She cannot conceal her spike of rage. They would send her back there, send her out alone, and take Elain from her, too. 

“Perhaps I will,” she says, and the edge on her voice is more hurt than she wants to admit.

“Be sure to write,” Cassian hisses, and for the first time she can feel the hurt in his voice too, the injured animal and the wounded feelings and the history that’s going to smother her. He doesn’t want her. He’s been too hurt by her. She turns and starts walking as fast as she can. “You could at least come live at the House,” he says, and she feels as if she has been slapped.

_“Stop,”_ she hisses, turning on him, and he does.  _“Stop_ following me.  _Stop_ trying to haul me into your happy little circle.  _Stop doing all of it.”_

“Your sisters love you,” he says, and the voice in her mind screams  _Liar, Liar, look at them tonight, happier without me, happier without me_ , and he continues “I can’t for the life of me understand why, but they do. If you can’t be bothered to try for my  _happy little circle_ ’s sake, then at least try for them.”

the voice in her head is louder than before.  _Liar, liar, liar, I’ve seen them, I know they are happier without me, just send me back to that hut in the woods where you all wished I’d died_ —and the anger is gone, the arousal is gone, leaving only the despair that is stronger than it has been all night.

“Go home, Cassian,” she says ,  and her voice is tired, and cold. Unstated—your home. Not mine. Not mine. She turns around and keeps walking and this time, he doesn’t follow her.

She doesn’t see the box he throws in the river. 

**Author's Note:**

> that’s Nesta “I’m Mad Nobody Got Me Any Presents So Let Me Throw Away My Only Present” Archeron for you


End file.
